Nvidia recently became the first company to breach the $4 trillion barrier in terms of market capitalisation or its overall worth. But now there's even more good news for bean counters and investors. Sales of Nvidia's AI chips to China are back on. Well, probably.
The news comes direct from Nvidia in a blog post, which says, "Nvidia is filing applications to sell the Nvidia H20 GPU again. The U.S. government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon."
The H20 is a GPU that was specifically designed to comply with export restrictions to China imposed in late 2023 by the Biden administration. In April this year, the Trump administration further tightened those restrictions, leading Nvidia to announce a $5.5 billion write down in the first quarter of this year.
Sales of H20 to China were effectively halted, but Nvidia's announcement indicates that they're back on. Or at least, that's what Nvidia's hopes. It's worth noting that the announcement isn't that Nvidia is once again shipping H20s to China, merely that applications to do so have been filed.
Of course, Nvidia is unlikely to have announced the applications if it wasn't confident they'd be granted. Indeed, the blog post also mentions direct contact between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and President Trump.
"In the U.S. capital, Huang met with President Trump and U.S. policymakers, reaffirming NVIDIA’s support for the Administration’s effort to create jobs, strengthen domestic AI infrastructure and onshore manufacturing, and ensure that America leads in AI worldwide," Nvidia said.
For context, H20 is a de-featured version of Nvidia's H100 AI GPU, which itself is based on last-gen Hopper technology. Nvidia's latest AI GPUs benefit from the newer Blackwell architecture, also found in various RTX 50-series gaming GPUs, up to and including the RTX 5090.
In other words, it's a long way off being the most powerful AI chip Nvidia makes. And yet it's still hugely appealing for any organisation operating in the AI industry and superior in many ways to anything produced locally in China.
For how much longer that continues, remains to be seen. But as Jensen Huang himself says, 50% of the world's AI researchers are in China. So, in the short term, the ability to sell AI chips into China will be a huge boost for Nvidia. If it happens, which it probably will. But hasn't actually started quite yet.
